


This Kid's Not Alright

by Flowerparrish



Series: Clint Barton Bingo [1]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bullying, Canon levels of violence, Deaf Clint Barton, High School AU, M/M, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, like actually less than but I wanted to tag for violence generally, mentioned ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 23:24:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18376208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowerparrish/pseuds/Flowerparrish
Summary: Clint didn’t honestly think he would fit in a school locker, even the larger ones in the gym’s locker rooms where the sports kids left their stuff.





	This Kid's Not Alright

**Author's Note:**

> My first Clint Barton Bingo fill! This one's for "high school." 
> 
> The title is from a song but it's just a lyric that stood out to me on while I was writing and listening to someone else's playlist, so... idk man. 
> 
> There's like... a lot of bullying in this fic. I'd like to say it's unrealistic, but it's based pretty strongly in my best friend's high school experience, so like... high school sucks.

Clint didn’t honestly think he would fit in a school locker, even the larger ones in the gym’s locker rooms where the sports kids left their stuff. Unfortunately, it’s Friday, and sports practices were cancelled because of the unhealthy air quality or something like that.

 

Clint’s trying very hard not to panic, but it’s becoming worryingly possible that he’s going to be stuck here all weekend, curled up in a cramped position he can only bend into because he’s fucking flexible. He’s only been here for a half an hour, give or take, but already he can tell that the position he’s in is constricting his ribs, and that means not panicking is even more important, because he might actually suffocate himself.

 

Clint hates bullies, especially the ones who pick on him because he’s got big and clunky BTEs and he’s a foster kid at a new school. But he’s going to hate these particular guys even _more_ if they actually get him killed instead of just roughing him up a little.

 

He’s counting his breaths, in for five seconds and out for eight, when a faint noise registers through his one hearing aid that the assholes didn’t destroy. “Hello?” he calls out, trying not to hope. “Um, help?” He’d bang on the metal of the locker, but he can’t get the leverage. He’d scream, but he can’t pull in enough air. He’s just got to hope he’s projecting his voice loudly enough to be heard.

 

For a moment, he doesn’t think it’s working, and then he picks up footsteps coming near. “Oh, thank fuck,” Clint says. “Can you let me out? Only, I kind of don’t want to die here.”

 

“You’re actually in the locker,” a voice says. Clint doesn’t recognize it, but that doesn’t surprise him for a lot of reasons. He’s only been here a week, so he doesn’t know many people, and his aids aren’t the best even when they aren’t broken from being knocked around.

 

“I’m aware,” Clint wheezes, because it’s actually kind of hard to say multiple sentences in a row in his current position.

 

“It’s locked,” the guy says—Clint’s almost certain it’s definitely a guy.

 

“No shit,” Clint says. “But it’s my locker.” He has to take a few seconds to breathe before he says, “thirty, then two, then seventeen,” and hopes the guy figures it out soon.

 

There’s a tell-tale clinking of metal that means the lock is being moved around, and then Clint hears the faintest _click_ as the lock pops open. “Thank fuck,” he breathes, his whole body tensing in anticipation of freedom.

 

Sure enough, the door opens, and Clint more or less tumbles out face first. A hand catches one of his shoulders in an attempt to steady him, but it’s too little, too late, and Clint just sort of crashes into the ground.

 

Whatever, he can breathe again, a few more bruises don’t even rate after that.

 

He wiggles around and rolls onto his back, taking a moment to stretch out and feeling the relief in his muscles, and then he blinks up at the guy who saved him.

 

_Oh, fuck,_ he thinks, because it’s that scary brooding guy with one arm who smokes cigarettes out back behind the art building at lunch. Clint knows because he’d considered hiding out there, but he didn’t want to risk interacting when faced with the guy’s angry glower the first time he approached, so he quickly found somewhere else (the library, his least favorite lunch place because they always got annoyed when he dared to make a sound chewing his food). “Uh, hey,” he says. “Sorry for—” He waves at the locker, gesturing in an attempt to encompass the whole ordeal.

 

The guy had been looking down at him with some expression that wasn’t a glower—maybe surprise? or pity?—but now he’s back to glaring. “Who put you in there?” he asks, only it doesn’t even really sound like a question; it’s more of a growl. It would be hot, if Clint wasn’t trying to decide if he’s about to get his ass kicked for the second time today. Upside, at least this guy probably wouldn’t stuff him back in the locker—too much effort with only one arm, and he did let Clint out in the first place.

 

“Just, like, Rumlow and his crew,” Clint says. “It’s whatever.”

 

“It’s not whatever,” the guy says. “Come on, the principal should still be here.”

 

Clint’s startled into scrambling to his feet. He winces at the speed of the movement and the havoc it wreaks on his sore body and muscles, but then he glares at the guy. “No way, I’m no snitch.”

 

The guy sighs, a long-suffering sound. “You’re as bad as Steve,” he mutters, and then he says, in a normal volume, “then they’re just going to do this again.”

 

“Next time I won’t let them catch me,” Clint counters, trying to sound like he believes it.

 

The guy tries staring him down, but Clint’s been stared down by way scarier people in his life. He’s pretty sure this guy’s not going to hit him, so he doesn’t even rank on the scary list anymore. “Whatever,” the guy finally says. “Your funeral.”

 

Clint winces. He knows it’s just a saying, but he also knows he totally could have died if this guy hadn’t helped him out. “Yeah,” he agrees. “But, uh, thanks for the save. I’m Clint.”

 

“Bucky,” the guy offers back.

 

“Well, Bucky, I owe you one,” Clint decides.

 

The glower unexpectedly returns. “You don’t.”

 

Clint shrugs, trying to look like he doesn’t feel awkward in the face of Bucky’s hostility. “Okay, whatever.” He starts poking through nearby lockers and finds his beat-up backpack in an unlocked one nearby. He shoulders it and then glances over at Bucky, who still hasn’t left. “I’m just gonna… go,” he says awkwardly after a second’s consideration.

 

Bucky shakes his head, but more in a defeated way than in protest, so Clint shuffles past him and crashes through the heavy metal doors back into the sunlight and warmth.

 

He’s definitely missed all of the buses, so he starts the long walk home.

 

***

 

Clint’s a little frustrated that he has foster guardians who, for once, know that he probably didn’t start the fight if he’s black and blue all over but his knuckles aren’t bruised or scraped. Pro: they get him a new pair of hearing aids that end up being way better than his old ones anyway. Con: they totally insist on calling the principal, who can’t do much if Clint doesn’t say who kicked the shit out of him, and, hell no, he’s not doing that. His foster people aren’t happy with him, and he’s not happy with them, and the principal isn’t happy in general ever, so there’s a lot of frustration going around by the time Clint heads off to school on Monday.

 

He’s surprised when someone drops into the seat next to him during economics, vaguely in the middle of the class and toward the left side of the room, the only seat that was open when Clint transferred in. The guy is scrawny and blond and his nose looks like it’s been broken a few times, which Clint can relate to. Clint thinks he might even be about to get his nose broken again, because he’s broken the unspoken rules and taken someone else’s not assigned but claimed seat.

 

The girl stands pointedly next to the seat for a few minutes as the scrawny kid ignores her, and then with a huff she leaves and takes the kid’s former seat.

 

It’s weird, but the kid doesn’t say anything to him, so eventually Clint tunes him out. The teacher tries to get a class discussion going, and everyone talking over each other plays havoc on his ears, new hearing aids or no, so he just doodles in his notebook until the class is over.

 

The blond kid is gone by the time Clint’s done packing up his shit, so Clint relaxes with the knowledge that whatever his seat changing stunt was about, it had nothing to do with Clint.

 

At lunch, Clint goes to the library, where the librarians and the other students glare as he tries to eat his baby carrots until he gives up and just decides to go hungry. He’s got enough practice doing that, anyway.

 

***

 

The next day, the blond kid is back, and he ruins whatever peace Clint had attained in the knowledge that this Wasn’t About Him.

 

“Hi,” the guy says. “I’m Steve.”

 

Clint tries to figure out why that name is familiar, and then he remembers Bucky muttering it under his breath on Friday.

 

It _could_ be a coincidence.

 

Clint doesn’t believe in coincidences.

 

Clint decides the best course of action is to ignore the guy and hope he loses interest. The guy looks disappointed at being ignored, but he keeps the seat. At the end of the class, Clint packs up his things and bolts before Steve can try to talk to him again.

 

By the time lunch comes, Clint’s pretty sure Steve isn’t a threat. It pays to be cautious, but the guy seems nothing if not friendly, which poses its own problems, but those ones Clint can handle. He knows to stick to Barney’s rules—keep his head down, don’t make trouble, don’t get attached—even if Barney isn’t here; he doesn’t honestly know how to live any other way at this point.

 

He’s not going to be friends with Steve or anything like that. But he does think, if Steve is Bucky’s friend and Bucky told Steve about the incident with the lockers, that maybe Bucky is Not Dangerous in a neutral way. He hasn’t gone out of his way to approach Clint, trying to make friends, and whatever he told Steve has the guy trying to befriend Clint, even though Bucky had been plenty annoyed with Clint on Friday.

 

What all of this means, basically, is that Clint _really_ wants that lunch spot behind the art building—he wants to be able to eat his damn food, okay, and not have to deal with his stomach hurting from hunger when he has perfectly good food to eat.

 

He’s sick of the library, so he’s going to risk it. He resolutely ignores the voice in his head that sounds like Barney telling him he’s an idiot, and he heads to the secluded spot.

 

Sure enough, Bucky is there, smoking like before. He looks up already glowering when he hears Clint coming, but his glare lessens when he spots Clint. “Oh, it’s you.”

 

“Me,” Clint agrees. “I’m just here to eat. You won’t even notice me, I promise.”

 

Bucky stares at him for a long moment, clearly considering that. After a few seconds in which Clint tries not to squirm under the scrutiny, he shrugs. “Whatever,” he agrees. “It’s a free country.”

 

Clint rolls his eyes and sits down against the cold brick of the building. He doesn’t say anything, and Bucky doesn’t glare at him when he crunches on his carrots.

 

It’s the best lunch he’s had since he moved here.

 

***

 

Tuesday is awful, because there’s a hastily scheduled mandatory anti-bullying lecture for the whole school just before lunch. It appears that the principal and Clint’s fosters have made a compromise around Clint’s reticence, and it’s the worst thing ever. He hates being crammed on uncomfortable gym bleachers along with the whole school, hates the Zero Tolerance Policy lecture they’re being given (not least because he knows it’s full of shit), and hates that his sickly green bruises stand out starkly against his skin and make it obvious this is all his fault.

 

Rumlow and his crew surround Clint before he can escape after, just behind the building because Clint, like an idiot, tried to duck out the back door without being noticed. They just push him around a little until he falls, shredding his jeans at the knees and the skin underneath as well, and then they head off, laughing obnoxiously.

 

Clint just kind of stays there for a minute, his palms and knees stinging, and reminds himself that this isn’t worth crying over.

 

It’s made worse when a voice he recognizes says, “Hey, are you okay?”

 

He takes a fortifying breath and looks up at Steve. “Fine,” he says, pushing himself to his feet. “I just… tripped.” It’s the least convincing lie ever, but there’s not much point in trying when they both know what happened.

 

“Right,” Steve agrees after a moment. “If you ever need a hand, let me know.”

 

Clint blinks, a bit incredulous. “So we can both get our asses kicked?”

 

Steve shrugs. “I don’t like bullies. A few bruises are a small price to pay for standing up to them.”

 

Clint privately thinks Steve’s crazy, if he’s not full of shit, but it’s not his problem. “Okay, sure,” he says after a minute. “Whatever makes you happy.”

 

Steve grins. It’s not half feral. “Awesome.”

 

When Clint turns up at his and Bucky’s lunch spot fifteen minutes later, he’s greeted by a ferocious glower. “You encouraged Steve to get in a fight with Rumlow?”

 

“No,” Clint says slowly, as he mentally replays the conversation. “Okay, a little, but mostly he offered to step in and I figured saying he was free to do whatever he wanted was the easiest way to make him stop talking.”

 

Bucky shakes his head and mutters something that sounds like “asshole,” but Clint’s ears can’t pick it up. He stands there, hesitating, unsure of his welcome and unwilling to fight for it, but after a second Bucky waves an arm that Clint takes as permission.

 

They don’t talk for the rest of the forty minutes of lunch, but at the end Bucky says, “Watch your back,” and it sounds more like a suggestion than a threat—possibly the first time ever in Clint’s life that those words haven’t been threatening.

 

“Always do,” Clint replies.

 

Bucky snorts, but he doesn’t say anything, just heads off to the main building and classes.

 

***

 

Clint settles into a routine. Steve says hi to him every day, and he still ignores him, because he’s not here to make friends. He’s not sure what he’s here for, but that’s beside the point.

 

He sits with Bucky at lunch, and they mostly don’t talk. It’s good.

 

He sometimes gets shoved into a locker by one of Rumlow’s steroid-ridden friends, and he maybe gets his ribs bruised at one point, but he’s had worse, and it’s not _that_ hard to ignore.

 

The status quo gets broken when his English teacher asks him to stay back after class to talk about his paper, and by the time he’s convinced her that, no, those are actually his words, he’s not dumb no matter what his grades say, he’s just usually not at a school long enough to stitch together anything like a cohesive education, can he go now, the buses have left. He could wait for the sports buses, and risk riding with the sports kids, but that seems like the worse of two evils, so instead he starts walking home.

 

He’s a few blocks away from school when a car pulls to a stop beside him. He glances over, wary, but it’s just Bucky and Steve.

 

“Need a ride?” Steve asks.

 

“No.”

 

“Where you headed?” Steve asks.

 

Clint starts walking again. The car creeps along beside him.

 

He glances over. “Just let us give you a ride so Steve doesn’t whine for an hour,” Bucky tells him. It’s both commanding and pleading in parts.

 

“I won’t—” Steve starts.

 

“You will,” Bucky says with a sigh. “I’m sick of it. Clint, get in the car.”

 

Clint hesitates. “Okay, fine, but this isn’t going to be a thing,” he says.

 

“Agreed,” Bucky says, at the same time as Steve asks, “Why not?”

 

Clint climbs into the backseat and shoves his backpack between his knees and the seat in front of him.

 

“Where to?” Steve asks as he signals and pulls back onto the road.

 

Clint rattles off his address, and a silence falls between the three of them. It’s nothing like the quiet between Bucky and Clint at lunch; this silence is awkward. Clint fidgets to try to expel the impulse to fill the silence with words.

 

He manages, somehow, to keep his mouth shut. Steve pulls up out front of Clint’s current house and parks, but he doesn’t kill the engine.

 

“Uh, thanks,” Clint says as he moves to escape the car.

 

“Any time, Clint,” Steve tells him. He sounds sincere. Clint doesn’t know what to do with that.

 

“Uh, okay.” He climbs out of the car, doesn’t trip over his own feet—hell yeah—and walks away without a backward glance.

 

Well, okay, he peeks out of the window beside the front door when he gets inside, and he sees that they’re only just now pulling away.

 

“Who dropped you off?” his foster mother asks as he drops his bag by the door and kicks off his beat up shoes.

 

“Just some guys from school.”

 

“Friends?” she asks. She looks hopeful.

 

Clint shrugs. “Not really.”

 

She deflates slightly, but smiles through it and offers him cookies that she baked because today is her day off from work.

 

Clint tells her no, thank you, ma’am, and heads up to his room to lay on his bed and wonder when all of this will be yanked away from him, too.

 

***

 

It takes a couple of weeks, but Clint starts to feel just… overwhelmingly guilty, all of the time.

 

It was easy to be a little shit when no one gave a shit about him. But as the weeks wear on, his foster parents seem to get better, not worse. They ask about his day and accept his monosyllabic answers and call the school when he turns up with torn up jeans and bruises. They spend more money on him than they’re getting from the state to keep him; they buy him junk food, even if the lunches they pack him (they pack him lunches! Every day!) are still healthy as fuck, and they offer to buy him new clothes and new shoes, and it’s too much, frankly. They don’t seem to understand that Clint doesn’t _deserve_ this, and it gets harder every day to be an asshole when they remain unrelentingly kind.

 

Barney has always told him not to trust anyone but him, but Clint trusted Barney, and Barney abandoned him the minute he turned eighteen. It feels _wrong,_ on a molecular level, to go against Barney’s orders, but the asshole isn’t around to see him breaking them, so slowly, inch by inch, Clint gives in.

 

He lets them buy him new shoes when his old ones tear at the seams. The new shoes aren’t two sizes too big in case he grows, and he doesn’t trip over his feet half as often anymore. It’s awesome.

 

He actually says a few sentences about his day—minus the bullying—and they reward him with smiles and interest that he still doesn’t think he deserves, but he’s too weak not to hoard it anyway.

 

The problem is, once he starts unfreezing around his foster parents, it’s hard to maintain distance at school. With Bucky it’s easier, because they sit and don’t talk and that’s their thing. But Steve still greets Clint cheerfully _every fucking day,_ and it’s exhaustingly difficult to ignore him.

 

So one day, Clint turns to Steve and says, “Hey.”

 

Steve’s smile is blinding in its brilliance. “How was your weekend?” he asks, even though it’s already Wednesday.

 

Clint shrugs. “Fine. Got new shoes.” He sticks one foot out the side of the desk so Steve can see.

 

“Awesome!” Steve says brightly. “They look really cool.”

 

Clint is abruptly having a problem where he doesn’t know what to do with a compliment, even if it’s just a compliment aimed at his shoes. He redirects. “How was your weekend?”

 

Steve launches into a tale about Bucky beating him at ping pong—“His aim is just unnaturally good!”—which is absurd and almost makes Clint laugh. He gets cut off when class starts, and Clint refocuses on school, because actually doing well in school is another thing he’s trying.

 

After class, Steve says, “You can hang out with me and my friends at lunch, if you want.”

 

“Nah, I usually hang out with Bucky,” Clint says. “But thanks.”

 

Steve’s eyebrows go up. “You hang out with Bucky?”

 

“Uh,” Clint says, “yeah? I mean, we just kind of sit five feet apart and don’t talk, but like… we’re in the same place?”

 

“Huh,” Steve says. “He never said. Well, if you ever want people to talk to, feel free to join us in the cafeteria.”

 

“Okay,” Clint agrees, having absolutely no intention of doing so.

 

Only as he’s walking to meet Bucky at their lunch spot later does it occur to him to wonder why Bucky spends his lunch hour alone when he has friends to be around. He thinks about asking, but Bucky has always respected Clint’s boundaries and never tried to pry, so he thinks maybe it’s best he just leaves it alone.

 

***

 

It all comes to a head on a Friday, roughly three months after Clint and Bucky first met during the locker incident.

 

Clint still talks to Steve in class every day, and sits with Bucky at lunch in silence, and every once in a while he accepts a ride home from them if he misses the bus. A time or two, Steve has persuaded him to hang out and play video games, and Clint has spent two whole lunches at Steve’s friends’ table in the cafeteria, feeling surly and awkward and like he has nothing to say.

 

But one day Steve’s busy with an art thing and Bucky’s nowhere to be found and Clint misses the bus, so he goes to walk home.

 

He finds Bucky by accident, cutting through the tennis courts and the mostly empty back parking lot because it’s a shortcut to the place he’s _almost_ starting to think of as home, facing off against Rumlow and his guys.

 

Rumlow throws the first punch, for all that Bucky blocks it, and Clint is mostly chill with people punching him—it’s been happening for most of his life, after all, and at some point he just learned to accept it—but he kind of sees red when Rumlow tries to punch Bucky.

 

Clint’s never had friends to be protective of; he can kind of see why Steve is the way he is, now.

 

They lose the fight terribly, because it’s two against seven and they’re not trained fighters, they’re just high school rejects, but Clint does remember spitting in Rumlow’s face, so it’s probably okay.

 

He’s blinking spots from his eyes as they walk away and he turns his head to look at where Bucky’s sprawled out on the ground next to him. He’s got a black eye forming, and Clint feels that rage again.

 

“Okay,” he says after a moment. He winces, because he definitely got punched in the mouth and his jaw is sore. “Let’s go tell the principal.”

 

“Why now?” Bucky asks.

 

Clint shrugs. “They went after you this time.”

 

Bucky stares at him, and then, like a crazy asshole, he laughs. “You’re a piece of work,” he says, but it doesn’t sound like an insult, so Clint just shrugs again.

 

Clint groans and pushes himself to his feet and then offers a hand to haul Bucky to his feet as well. Bucky takes it, and when he’s standing, he turns his fingers to tangle them in Clint’s. “So like, don’t punch me or anything, I’ve already got a black eye,” he says.

 

“Uh, what?” Clint replies, because he’s suddenly not too sure what’s happening.

 

“Can I kiss you?” Bucky asks. Their fingers are still tangled together.

 

“Me?”

 

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Yes, you.”

 

Clint considers it. He thinks about Bucky and his exasperation with Clint, and how he’s always respected Clint’s boundaries and decisions, how he’s never pushed Clint for anything more than he was willing to give, and then he thinks about the overwhelming rage he felt when Rumlow swung at Bucky, and he says, “Yeah. Like, hell yeah.”

 

Bucky laughs softly and then, just like that, they’re kissing.

 

It’s not Clint’s first kiss. It’s not even his first kiss with a boy, for all that Barney raged when he found out about that one. But it’s Clint’s best first kiss by far. It doesn’t feel like fireworks; it feels warm and safe and close, and it stings just a little where his lip is split.

 

It’s perfect.

 

***

 

In the end, Rumlow gets suspended for three days. It’s a bullshit tribute to their Zero Tolerance policy, and Clint’s foster parents are pissed, but Clint can’t even be bothered to care. He just replays the kiss in his head, remembers the feeling of his fingers tangled in Bucky’s, and thinks about how for the first time since he doesn’t even know when, he has something to look forward to.


End file.
